Tag: saturday

I think that the title for this one is rather confusing. But I assure you that it will make perfect sense by the time you are finished reading.

I live in a country where the general idea of work is: If you work long hours in the office, it means that you are hard-working. The law allows up to 48 working hours per week. So that’s pretty much the standard in most working environments. Strange is the person who thinks that the law’s limit doesn’t have to be the established working schedule.
To me, personally, working long hours is just a sign of incompetence or disorganization. Companies specifically ask for people who can ‘work under pressure’. And this is a fact. They ask for this. This means ‘we are not into organizing stuff, and we need you to do the same‘. I think that, if you are organized, you will rarely need to rush to meet a deadline.
With this in mind, we had a work-week made up of six days. Monday through Friday was from 8am to 4pm and Saturday they claimed that it was a ‘half day’ of 5 hours, from 9am to 2pm. A regular shift is 8 hours long, so a half-shift should be 4 hours.
To this day I can’t seem to make them understand this: If they plan on keeping it a 5 hour shift, they should stop calling it a ‘half day’. Anyway, I must focus.

They claimed that working on Saturday was necessary to ‘correct mistakes’.
From Monday to Friday, you were supposed to design the lessons to be recorded. And then, on Saturday you would use the day to ‘improve’ or ‘correct’ the mistakes that you had had. I might read a little strange here, but, why would I need time to correct something that I have already finished? I mean, yes, nobody is perfect. Anyone can definitely improve their own work. But the idea was not to improve, it was to fix up stuff.
Larry stated that ‘during the week, you might not get time to do things right, so that is what Saturday is for’.

This never made any sense to me. And, frankly, almost everyone, I mean…well…9 out of 10 people didn’t actually DO any work on Saturday because they were too tired from the week. Or they simply didn’t want to be there. They felt it was a waste of time. They could easily do the work in a 5 day-period, with good quality.
On Saturdays we came in at 9 o’clock. Most people had breakfast delivered and took an hour to eat-including Larry. We could have easily left work at 1 pm if we avoided that eating-period or had breakfast at home. Or, we could have arrived at 8 o´clock and leave at 12 o’clock. THEN it would be a half-day.

But why do I concern myself with this? Because I feel that a company is a living, breathing organism. If people are happy and well rested, they produce more and tend to have a more positive attitude. And this was producing the exact opposite.
On Saturday, people married and with children (about half of the employees at the time) got home at around 3 o’clock, had lunch and it was already dark. The only day that we really had available to rest, do house-work, visit relatives and have some family time, was Sunday.
And by the time you were done with laundry or washing the car or whatever, and wanted a break, it was already Monday again. So a lot of teachers showed up on Monday exhausted. Might I add that some studies show that mental distress consumes your energy much more that physical stress. And it has always been about intelectual work here.

At one time I approached Mr.Gestures and told him flat-out, that Saturdays was a wasted day. Nobody did actual work that day or they simply weren’t fans of using up an extra day that was practically unnecessary. I even told him that he would save the electricity of 3 large offices (6 to 12 people) and their respective air-conditioners. For your information, we worked inside a remodeled large factory building made of block and steel, which got considerably hot during the summer months (40 to 48 degrees Celsius). So the electricity bill during the summer was quite high.
The extra day off would help employees to arrive well-rested on Monday and, in consequence, they would be more productive. Not to mention the reduction of the electricity bill.

He simply said that people were way too lazy and we shouldn’t give them extra time to slack-off. And that the difference in the electricity bill wasn’t something he was worried about. He claimed that he had worked his entire life, from dusk to dawn and it was how we should get used to work, so why should we do it differently?
As a result, Saturdays remained as part of the work schedule.

So, everyone kept taking their breakfast to work and they took their hour eating. Sometimes even more. Most of the time, they barely did any work and all of the employees just sat, surfed the internet and stared at the watch every couple of hours. There wasn’t much to do. Some people used Saturday to recuperate the time they slacked off during the week. It wasn’t indispensable, that was for sure.

Evolution? Umm…..no, thanks.

In short, here is the lesson:
Put yourself in the shoes of your employees. If you have worked your entire life in a certain way and you enjoy it, don’t think that everyone else thinks the same or is willing to live life just as you have. Just because you like vanilla ice cream, doesn’t mean that everyone is going to like it. And you shouldn’t try to force them to like it either.
Also, change is inevitable. Years ago we had telephones, then pagers, then cell phones, now it’s smart phones and tablets. Every moment that passes by technology is getting closer to those science-fiction realities that we once saw in the movies. And things that took us months or weeks, can now get done in days or hours.
If your employees are well rested, if they have time to spend with their families, if you let them have a personal life or a social life, they will show up on Mondays-and every day-with a better attitude, more tranquil, healthier, happier and more focused on their daily tasks. In return, you will get better production results and a better working environment.